20th-century Political Scientist Quotes

Bearing all this in mind, we see that there is no Russian national understanding which would permit the early establishment in Russia of anything resembling the private enterprise system as we know it.

George F. Kennan

Until the modern era there was no single international system, but rather several international systems, with little or no contact with another.

In a despotic government, the ultimate principle of order issues from the inclinations of the despot himself. Yet despotism is not a system in which justice is entirely meaningless: it has generally prevailed in highly traditional societies where custom is king and the prevailing terms of justice are accepted as part of the natural order of things. Each person fits into a divinely recognized scheme. Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call 'the mandate of heaven', but life for the peasant changes little. Everything depends on the wisdom of the ruler.

Kenneth Minogue

Cultural constraints condition and limit our choices, shaping our characters with their imperatives.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Humility, which Burke ranked high among the virtues, is the only effectual restraint upon this congenital vanity; yet our world has nearly forgotten the nature of humility. Submission to the dictates of humility formerly was made palatable to man by the doctrine of grace; that elaborate doctrine has been overwhelmed by modern presumption.

After I left the White House, I kept a foothold in the business of American politics; as a talk-show host, analyst, commentator, speechmaker, and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner, but I was still a partisan, a Democrat, a blue-stater through and through.

People may go to the library looking mainly for information, but they find each other there.

Robert D. Putnam

Would you, like Benjamin Constant, have concluded that events as tumultuous as these ought to lead to the reestablishment of a liberal and constitutional order? If your name were Carl Schmitt, you would have done the exact opposite: you would have interpreted the tumult of your times as the best reason for getting rid of liberalism altogether.

The Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so. The time is long past to put it out of business.

Norman Finkelstein

No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.

Nonviolent action involves opposing the opponent's power, including his police & military capacity, not with the weapons chosen by him but by quite different means...Repression by the opponent is used against his own power position in a kind of political " ju-jitsu " and the very sources of his power thus reduced or removed, with the result that his political and military position is seriously weakened or destroyed.

Rational action is merely a question of calculating the chances.

Any universe uneven enough to sustain the life of a flat-worm should perhaps be uneven enough to be eventually known by man.

What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.

Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but doubt of which he is unaware.

Harold Lasswell

No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the facade of democratic institutions.

The British public has always displayed a healthy cynicism of MPs. They have taken it for granted that MPs are self-serving impostors and hypocrites who put party before country and self before party.